Holding The Line Guide Service

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The purpose of our trip was twofold this morning. Besides catching fish, we fine-tuned Claude’s own sonar equipment to provide him with all the fish location potential it is capable of.

Did something a little different this morning … I guided but did so on my guest’s own boat. I teamed up with Claude C. of Ding Dong, TX. He’s fished with me several times and noted how I make use of marine electronics to find and catch fish. As a result, he’s upgraded his own sonar units on his pontoon boat to a Lowrance HDS-5 and a Lowrance HDS-7 with StructureScan capability and asked me to accompany him to get his electronics “zero’ed” in.

We started with the basics of making sure the transducers were mounted properly and level. We then powered the units up and made sure the “sourcing” was correct, meaning that each unit was programmed to receive the intended sonar and StructureScan input being sent to it. Next, we went deep into each unit’s menus and got the units tweaked just right for the conditions we encountered today. Then, it was off to the fishing grounds.

What great white bass weather today! It was cloudy overnight, balmy this morning, overcast, and with a SSW wind — you couldn’t special-order better weather than that!

Claude’s trolling motor battery had some troubles bucking the wind, so, we lost some opportunities there but tried to compensate by anchoring where appropriate.

Despite a shortened fishing effort due to the sonar tinkering and low batteries on the troller, by 11:30am we had boated exactly 45 white bass all on horizontally worked blade baits in no more than 27 feet of water and with some coming from as little as 8 feet of water, which wasn’t surprising given that the surface temperatures have climbed to 55-57 F with the mild weather of late.

Our best success came at Areas 054, 595, and 107.

If you find yourself, like Claude, owning quality electronics that you are not sure how to use or adjust, please give me a call and we can plan a trip around getting you to the next step in making the most of your investment.